What happens when the town’s biggest employer gets sold?

The country’s top distributor of fresh salsa isn’t in California—it’s hidden in the suburbs of Detroit.

The warehouse and production facilities for Garden Fresh Gourmet hum with the activity of nearly 500 employees who help the firm do $100 million a year in revenue selling salsa, chips, hummus, and dips. But there is no branding on the walls or obvious signage declaring that you’ve just arrived at a snack food powerhouse that was recently acquired by Campbell Soup CPB for $231 million—making it one of the biggest paydays for a Michigan entrepreneur in recent memory.

But even before the ink was dry on the contract at the end of June, the people of Ferndale, which sits just on the other side of the infamous Eight Mile Road from Detroit, were wondering what the deal would mean for them. After all, Garden Fresh is the city’s largest employer, and its founders, Jack and Annette Aronson, have been instrumental in local philanthropy and economic development, helping push the area’s industrial vacancy rate down from 25% five years ago to 5% today.

“The Aronsons have garnered international attention that reflects on Ferndale,” says Mayor Dave Coulter. “We have other businesses who have come here in part because of their story. And with the sale, there is a new understanding in our community of the importance of businesses like Garden Fresh.

“Obviously there is some nervousness,” he adds. “We don’t ultimately know what Campbell’s commitment to Ferndale will be. But so far, I’m optimistic.”

The Aronsons founded Garden Fresh nearly two decades ago in the back of their struggling barbeque restaurant after Jack came home from a trade show with the idea for a preservative-free salsa. He began mixing up batches in five-gallon buckets, tweaking the recipe until he got it right.

“I remember the day I went in to Jack and Annette’s place and in the Pepsi cooler instead of pop there was a bucket of homemade salsa,” says Coulter. “I remember thinking, ‘What in the heck is this about?’”

The restaurant failed, but the salsa succeeded and built a brand that calls Kroger and Costco its largest customers. Not bad for the hometown boy who delivered newspapers in Ferndale as a kid and married his high school sweetheart.

“I think this has been inspiring to a lot of people,” says Dave Zilko, vice chairman of and spokesman for Garden Fresh. “It’s an only-in-America story: These flunkies from Detroit start a fresh salsa company and sell it to a Fortune 500 company.”

The Aronsons rebuffed numerous offers from other large conglomerates in past years and were initially skeptical of Campbell’s interest. In fact, Zilko assumed a meeting would be perfunctory, but his five-minute meet and greet became a three-hour chat. When Campbell said it was committed to fresh ingredients and maintaining production in five-gallon buckets—as it is still done today in order to preserve the flavor profile—Zilko knew he’d found the right people to grow Garden Fresh into the future.

“I came back to talk to Jack and Annette, and tears started rolling down her face,” he says. “At first Jack didn’t want to sell; he wanted to wait a few more years. He’s never wanted to be the biggest, just the best. But I told him, ‘If you care about Garden Fresh, you want the company to end up in hands like these.’”

Todd Putman, Campbell’s new general manager of Garden Fresh, says the company has retained most of its existing employees and that job applications are up fourfold since Campbell took over in July.

“They can offer higher wages and more generous benefit package than we were able to offer,” Zilko says. “There is more security for our employees because there is more opportunity to advance. I think the sale will enhance their careers.”

Putman won’t confirm the new pay or benefits but says that Campbell is committed to fair compensation and offers paid vacation and sick days. Even more important—Garden Fresh is not leaving town.

“We didn’t do anything to make applications go up other than communicate that we’re here and we’re here to stay,” he says. “We love Ferndale. It’s an up-and-coming city. We’ve got lots of long-term plans to make Ferndale thrive and grow.”

The Aronsons aren’t done with Ferndale either. The couple is launching a philanthropic organization as well as a new company that will offer processing to other food entrepreneurs. Zilko says the couple, who are famous in the region for mentoring startups—including Drought cold-pressed juice and McClure’s Pickles—will continue to do so through their Startup Engine Entrepreneur Depot program. They will also retain ownership of the line of stuffed burgers they started with Zilko and market them under the name Jack’s Special Grilled.

For local entrepreneur Rifino Valentine, it’s a boon to have a $1 billion unit of a Fortune 500 company just six blocks away from his micro-distillery, which produces award-winning vodka, gin, and bourbon.

“The fact that Garden Fresh was here was front and center in my mind,” he says. “It showed me that there is actually a lot of manufacturing here and not just metal work and stamping auto parts. There are quality consumables.”

A former Wall Street trader originally from Michigan, Valentine opened his namesake distillery in 2008 near Lansing with an eye toward Detroit. But he found navigating the policies and politics of Detroit too difficult at that time, so he considered Ferndale as a suitable alternative. Valentine recently tripled the size of his production facility to meet demand and expects to expand distribution beyond the eight states he currently serves.

That growth is just one small part of the 4,200 new manufacturing jobs created in the area last year, according to a recent report from Austin, Texas-based Headlight Data. Wayne County, in which Detroit sits and Ferndale borders, posted the country’s highest growth in manufacturing jobs in 2014.

“A lot of cities like Ferndale—we look for those high-tech companies and startups or midsize companies,” says Mayor Coulter. “But in Michigan I think the food production business and the distilling business are two underappreciated but fast-growing sectors. We now have two mead distillers.” Ultimately, the sale of Garden Fresh to Campbell will be good for Ferndale, Coulter says, “because it helps put a spotlight on just how active and successful these sectors are.”

A huge percentage of Etsy sellers are women

Take a look through the names of Etsy store owners online and you’ll notice something cool: They’re nearly all run by women. In fact, 86% of Etsy ETSY businesses have female owners, according to a report released by the company.

Meanwhile, just one-third of businesses in the U.S. are run by women, according to the Los Angeles Times. Brooklyn-based Etsy reported that 56% of sellers have a college degree and have an average household income of $56,180.

The median age of the sellers is 39 and over a third are less than 35-years-old.

“When you think of an entrepreneur, who do you picture?” asks Althea Erickson, Etsy’s global policy director, in a blog post announcing the report. “I don’t immediately picture my neighbor, who sews baby quilts at her kitchen table on evenings and weekends, and drops off packages at the post office during her lunch break. Yet that last image is very much the picture of an Etsy entrepreneur.”

“They’re the kind of people that got a lot of compliments on their items and people said, ‘You should sell it,'” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester Research analyst, to the newspaper. “Etsy provided them a platform for doing so.”

Per Etsy:

76% of Etsy sellers consider their shops to be businesses, and 30% focus on their creative businesses as their sole occupation. This business mindset is also reflected in Etsy sellers’ aspirations—90% wish to grow their sales in the future.

The Etsy report surveyed 4,000 sellers from November 2014 to January 2015. The company says that there are 1.4 million active Etsy sellers around the world.

Entrepreneurs come from families with money

The secret sauce to being a successful entrepreneur is apparently coming from a family with money. Quartz reported that when a person has more cash on hand, they’re able to take the risks needed to kickstart a business.

“Many other researchers have replicated the finding that entrepreneurship is more about cash than dash,” according to Andrew Oswald, a University of Warwick professor, in an interview with Quartz. “Genes probably matter, as in most things in life, but not much.”

A 2013 research paper cited by the publication also found that shared traits among entrepreneurs included being white, male and well-educated. “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit,” according to Ross Levine, one of the economists who wrote the study, to Quartz.

Per the article:

The average cost to launch a startup is around $30,000, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor show that more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family.

For more on entrepreneurship, here are 10 quotes from Shark Tank’s “Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin O’Leary, on the subject.

Jeb Bush wants more companies like Uber

Jeb Bush posted his first missive on a newly created LinkedIn profile today, establishing the presidential candidate’s presence on yet another social media platform. He follows Hillary Clinton, who joined LinkedIn and wrote her own inaugural post in May.

Bush had California on his mind as he wrote about “digital disruption,” saying “I don’t mind disrupting the established order.” Bush spent the day visiting (via Uber) the start-up Thumbtack, which connects users with local service professionals like dog-walkers and photographers. There, he echoed his statements on LinkedIn, praising Uber and Thumbtack as services of the future.

In his LinkedIn post, Bush took potshots at Hillary Clinton, writing that the Democratic candidate “rejected some of the core elements of the shared economy.” He said that liberals “can’t embrace digital innovation because it threatens the way they govern,” adding that Democrats feel threatened by food trucks, ride-sharing services and Airbnb because they endanger traditional taxes and unions.

On Monday, Clinton praised the sharing economy with caveats, saying that “it’s also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.” Clinton’s own LinkedIn post echoed Bush’s focus on small business, proposing tax and regulatory relief to help small business owners succeed.

Why America’s small businesses aren’t cheering same-sex marriage

While large companies like Coca-Cola KO, Tide, American Airlines AAL, and Kellogg Company K hailed last month’s Supreme Court’s pro-marriage equality verdict, posting heart-infused Tweets and rainbow-laden ads on the Internet, not all have been celebrating. Small businesses, particularly in the wedding industry, are likely to lament the landmark decision in the name of religion. Think the baker. The florist. The photographer. The stationery maker. The wedding singer. Because the products they sell are arguably expressive and an artistic creation that communicates a message, the law may be on their side.

This goes back to a now-infamous 2006 case in which a New Mexico husband-and-wife photography duo cited the artistic nature of their work as justification for their refusal to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. Relying on the premise that photography is inherently expression-laden deserving First Amendment protection, Elane Photography claimed that New Mexico’s law requiring them to serve all clients regardless of sexual orientation improperly compelled the company to express messages with which it disagreed.

The company also invoked its religious beliefs in seeking an exemption from the New Mexico public accommodations law. While the same-sex plaintiffs ultimately won in the courtroom, the case is indicative of an inherent tension between a business owner’s religious views and laws that allegedly force the business to express or endorse ideas that are contrary to the owner’s deeply-held religious beliefs.

The Elane Photography case foreshadowed a tension that continues to play out in the small business world. Since the Supreme Court released its historic same-sex marriage decision less than a month ago, the clash between religious freedom and LGBT rights has intensified, especially in the wedding industry.

Some recent examples: In Colorado and Oregon, bakers were fined for refusing to make cakes for same-sex weddings. In Upstate New York, a family-owned farm that serves as an event venue faced civil penalties for refusing to host a same-sex wedding on their property. And a Washington florist was fined for refusing to provide the flowers at a gay couple’s wedding.

Complicating the matter is last year’s Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling that allows corporations that claim religious affiliations to seek exemptions from laws that are allegedly inconsistent with their religious beliefs.

In light of that decision, just last Friday, the Obama administration announced new rules that would allow religious nonprofits and some for-profit companies a religious-based opt-out of the Affordable Care Act’s HHS Mandate. On the surface, these rules seem to strengthen and empower a business’s argument that servicing a same-sex couple violates its religious freedom. But the new rules are narrow, applying only to employers that object to providing health insurance coverage for abortifacients, and they overlook the pushed-under-the-rug “attenuation” argument more specific to the same-sex marriage controversy.

So, how do we anticipate the Supreme Court will reconcile these decisions? And how does this precedent affect the small wedding vendors, which are more likely to face what they perceive as a commercial Catch-22: serve the same-sex consumer or assert their religiously-based objections and face potential fines?

The fact is that most wedding-related vendors are local struggle-‘til-they-make-it start-ups, built from the ground up with hard work, personal investments, and significant risks. Many times, there is no obvious schism between the small business and the individual. The baker works out of her own kitchen; the wedding singer practices in her home studio; the stationary maker prints in her garage. The small business owner – especially those that make a living on serving engaged couples – consider their product an art – an extension of themselves.

But when an artist sells a piece, she no longer has a voice in how or by whom it is experienced. An architect certainly does not condone all conduct that occurs inside the buildings she designs. A painter does not endorse the beliefs or actions of the owners that purchase her paintings. And a baker, whose culinary art is available for public consumption, no more participates in the wedding of a same-sex couple she serves than in a child’s birthday, a retirement party, or anniversary.

Wedding vendors beware. Your cake, while beautiful, undoubtedly delicious, and conceivably artistic, is a commercial product sold from business owner to consumer. So, let the same-sex couple have their cake and eat it too.

Danielle Weatherby is an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law.

Power Home Remodeling named the Best Workplace for Millennials

The career paths of Asher Raphael and Corey Schiller (35 and 33, respectively) at Power Home Remodeling Group are telling of the unique culture of ambition that prevails at this Chester, Pennsylvania-based exterior home improvement company. Both men started in entry-level jobs at Power on the same day in 2003. By 2014, they were co-CEOs.

According to Power’s 1,500 employees, the company is focused on the needs of its millennial workforce—it garnered the highest scores in Great Place to Work’s recent survey of 90,000 workers under the age of 35. Not only are both CEOs millennials, but so are 84% of the staff, whose average age is 29 years old. Power focuses on empowering its employees and creating opportunities for advancement—ultimately making it the employer of the happiest millennial workers in the U.S. and handing it the No. 1 spot on Great Place to Work’s inaugural list of the 100 Best Workplaces for Millennials. That means it beat out Google, which appears at No. 25 despite being the current leader on Fortune‘s annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. (The ranking of the Millennials list was determined solely by employee feedback, not by company perks or benefits.)

Comments gathered by Great Place to Work indicate that 99% of Power employees have “great pride” in the company and feel they have “great bosses,” while 100% say that Power offers “great challenges” — an important motivator for the millennial generation. “We challenge our people, that’s a big part of our culture,” says Raphael. “We don’t want to just find great people, we want to challenge them to get better.” One employee told Great Place to Work, “The culture in this company is unreal.”

As one might imagine, it is difficult to recruit strong corporate candidates to a construction company. “Home remodeling is an amazingly splintered industry,” says Raphael. “It often brings with it people who took some of the easier roads in life. Maybe they didn’t finish their education, maybe haven’t had the best track record. For us, just because that’s what is represented in our industry it doesn’t have to be that way. We can get people that have graduated from law school or have MBAs. And that can be our biggest differentiator.”

Or they can get people who spent nearly a decade on reality television. Paula Beckert, who was on the 2006 season of MTV’s “The Real World” and spent years starring in “Road Rules” challenges, joined Power as an office manager in January. Like many, she couldn’t imagine what she might bring to a home remodeling company. “My mother-in-law came across the job listing, and I’m like, ‘What the hell do I know about home remodeling?’ And then from the interview alone, I said to myself, ‘I don’t care if they sell pancakes, I want to work for this company,'” Beckert told Fortune. “Once I stopped doing the wild and crazy thing in my youth, I was looking for a career, not just a job. Asher said, ‘Give me a year, and if this isn’t your favorite place, you can move on.’ After the first month I knew I loved it. I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.”

Power’s culture isn’t about perks. In fact Jackie Herb, a business technology director who has been at Power for a year and a half, says, “I wouldn’t even say that we have many perks. There’s no pool table, no game room, there’s just the people. But before Power, I was in sales, and when I was having a good week, my managers loved me and they said, ‘Let’s go grab a drink,’ but when I was having a crappy week, they treated me like garbage. Corey and Asher don’t look at it that way. And that says a lot about the culture, top-down.”

Raphael and Schiller have also placed an emphasis on using more tech, both internally and for the customer, to improve service. The entire company’s data is on Nitro, a proprietary internal database that is part social network, part black book of customers. And the company pays well. Millennials know that the biggest producers make the biggest salaries. “LeBron James makes significantly more money than his teammates, and that seems justified to them,” says Schiller. “And we agree. You can earn a lot money here, if you produce.” The average salary of a marketing rep is $60,000 to $100,000, while sales reps (called “remodeling consultants”) make $70,000 to $150,000. The top-performing sales reps make $250,000.

***

On their path to becoming co-CEOs, Raphael and Schiller ruffled some feathers at the company more than once. They wanted to expand quickly, while their senior colleagues were cautious. At one point in 2011, the two of them had to stop for a second and take a breath. You could call it a “millennial moment.”

Raphael and Schiller started working for the home improvement contractor after college. Both had gone to American University and played varsity soccer there, and both rose in the company step by step. The two of them were VPs (Raphael in sales, Schiller in marketing) when they began vocally lobbying for Power to expand and open new offices. They started by consolidating Power’s three small satellite offices (in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey; Newark, Delaware; and Fort Washington, Pennsylvania) into one company headquarters in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania. (In 2011, they relocated the headquarters down the road to Chester, where it is today.)

In 2008, the two young hotshots (both still under 30) got what they wanted: Raphael and Schiller were named heads of strategy, and they were tapped to lead an expansion—in the middle of an economic downturn. “That was a difficult thing, we had to find a balance of pushing ourselves but with checks to make sure,” says Raphael. “No one believed in what we were doing. We met with manufacturers that wouldn’t even sell us their products. It had to do with our age—they thought we were overly ambitious—but also our model wasn’t proven, and had even been somewhat disproven by other companies in the industry that tried to expand and failed.”

They opened the first new offices in 2009: one in Cranford, New Jersey, and one in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Cranford office brought in $18 million in revenue in the first 10 months. It had taken Power, which was founded in 1992, 15 years to get to that size at its Chester headquarters. The Greenbelt office has since overtaken headquarters in Chester to become the largest staffed location in the company, with more than 200 employees.

The experiment had worked. So from 2009 to 2011, Raphael and Schiller lived on the road, opening up satellite locations and evolving the vision for the company. Raphael describes it as a “scary time,” since competitors in the home remodeling industry had never succeeded at expanding at such a fast rate, and most had remained local, with just one or two offices. But the friends believed each satellite office could grow to $40-80 million in annual revenue as long as they were right outside major cities.

In 2011, Power opened three new offices: in Long Island, outside Boston, and outside Atlanta. “By the time we opened the office in Atlanta, we realized we were spreading ourselves a little thin,” says Raphael. “And I think at that moment, Corey and I and some others decided we need to take a step back.”

All three of those offices were successful and turned a profit the following year. So, by Raphael’s summation, “If what was driving us were just dollars, we would have opened up like 4 or 5 offices the next year. All of a sudden, people were saying, ‘Why don’t you open up more, more, more.’ The tune had certainly changed from when they first began their expansion crusade in 2007.

But that moment of vertigo—the sudden need to pump the brakes for a moment—is indicative of what can happen with millennials in the workplace. Experts say the generation (typically characterized as those in the workforce under the age of 35 this year) can be high-energy, ambitious, and competitive in the workplace. They also do best when guided and mentored. Power places an emphasis on mentorship, as well as access to leaders (employees say they can walk into the CEOs’ offices any time to ask a question.) In 2011, Schiller was named CEO, and in 2014 Raphael became co-CEO.

With $310 million in revenue in 2014, Power Home Remodeling is small. But Asher Raphael says he and Corey Schiller aim to grow its influence by “fighting an industry stigma: that there’s no real scale or professionalism, that it’s a dead-end type of thing, a place for misfits. And for a long time now, I think we’ve been winning that fight. We get really impressive people to work here. And a byproduct of great people is that they get other great people to come.”

A skeptic’s look at Goldman Sachs’ plan to help Main Street

This week, news emerged that Goldman Sachs GS plans to launch a new business to lend money directly to consumers and small businesses. The investment bank is as Wall Street as you can get, but the rationale behind its move to lend to Main Street isn’t surprising. It’s a good way to put its balance sheet to work, and consumer lending might also help Goldman connect with average Americans who may not understand the bank’s business.

After the 2008 financial crisis when Goldman became a bank holding company, it could take in more customer deposits, which led to an increase in its holdings of more than $40 billion over the past six years. Bank executives estimate that consumer lending could provide a return on equity of nearly 20% on that capital, according to The Wall Street Journal.

But while it’s good that Goldman will put its vast hoard of capital to work instead of just sitting on it, it’s less clear why consumers and small businesses will want to borrow money from the banking giant. Here are 4 questions that Goldman should answer to convince Main Street that it could be its next community bank.

What’s the cost to borrowers?

The loans that Goldman plans to provide will reportedly be unsecured by collateral, which is attractive for borrowers but can also be expensive. Unsecured loans typically come at a high interest rate due to the risk involved. If the bank is hoping to make 20% returns, it’s hard to see how borrowers will get a good deal. These types of loans also carry other risks, such as demand provisions under which a bank can arbitrarily demand repayment, as well as high default rates, putting borrowers in a difficult spot.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. So Goldman needs to show consumers the fine print. Will the bank provide some unique value to borrowers or trap them into loans that could blow up later?

What are the risks to the U.S. economy?

Goldman plans to offers loans online — a marketplace that’s crowded and competitive. In addition, traditional bricks-and-mortar banks have well-established lending practices that are known to consumers. That makes Goldman’s entry a challenging task and potentially an invitation to risk-taking. In order to secure market share, it will need to differentiate its loans from competitors, which is hard to do without either decreasing interest rates substantially or lowering lending standards.

Given that Goldman has historically sought to maximize profits, the former scenario is unlikely, implying that even though the bank is currently targeting consumers with good credit, there is a risk the bank may have to relax lending requirements to attract more clients. That in turn could force competitors to follow suit and trigger the same cycle that damaged our financial system in 2008 when lenders issued mortgages to borrowers with poor credit profiles. In addition, the New York Times reports that Goldman may eventually securitize these loans in much the same way they did with subprime mortgages, an obvious red flag.

So the question is how will Goldman achieve its targeted profitability without compromising its standards and (possibly) precipitating wider economic problems?

Can consumers trust Goldman?

Goldman may be hoping that this new venture will soften its image and make it more popular with average Americans, but it’s hard to forget its role in the subprime mortgage crisis that destroyed billions of dollars of value on Main Street, not to mention people’s livelihoods. Also, as the chief architect of toxic mortgage securitizations that indirectly enabled bait-and-switch lending, Goldman is actually a pretty odd choice for a lender.

The bank already lends to wealthy individuals, but those are sophisticated borrowers who can generally protect themselves from being exploited. Average consumers and small businesses, on the other hand, need to trust lenders in order to do business with them. Goldman’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein said in a memo obtained by CNNMoney that he sees opportunity in broadening the bank’s customer base online, but he must first show why the general public should trust a bank that it feels sold it out in the past.

Will Goldman protect consumers?

American consumer debt is at an all-time high of $3.2 trillion, according to Bloomberg. While increasing debt means more spending, which is good for the U.S. economy, it also puts more Americans at risk of insolvency. If the economy remains buoyant, the risk is minimal; but even a temporary blip in business activity can lead to a drop in wages and employment, which affects average Americans’ ability to repay their loans.

Goldman’s entry into the business exacerbates this trend and could wind up adding billions to this already dangerously high number, especially if the bank charges high interest or variable interest on its unsecured loans. What this means is that the bank needs to consider the potential consequences of enabling America’s debt addiction, and at the very least, provide a strong safety net for borrowers who get into trouble.

That would certainly help Main Street and help improve Goldman’s image.

S. Kumar is a tech and business commentator. He has worked in technology, media, and telecom investment banking. Kumar does not own shares of Goldman Sachs.

Sorry, San Francisco: Starbucks is closing La Boulange

It’s long been a popular hang for San Francisco pastry lovers, and a meeting spot for Silicon Valley techies, and soon it will be no more. Starbucks is set to close all 23 locations of La Boulange bakeries by the end of September.

The coffee giant bought the small pastry chain from the Next World Group, an investment firm, in 2012 for $100 million. It was one of the biggest acquisitions it had made at that time. It was a move to beef up Starbucks’s food offerings, and it worked for a time.

At the time of the deal, CEO Howard Schultz said that Starbucks would now be “able to say that we are bakers.” Now the company has deemed it more worthwhile to focus on its core business instead. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the stores built up “a cultlike following in the Bay Area.”

La Boulange is just one of many food brands Starbucks has bought over the years, including Teavana, Evolution Fresh, Seattle’s Best, and, last year, Hacienda Alsacia, a coffee farm in Costa Rica. It has since closed the Seattle’s Best stores and now plans to close its Evolution Fresh store in San Francisco. Howard Schultz, who took some fire recently for the botched “Race Together” program, was Fortune‘s Businessperson of the Year in 2011.

La Boulange, which has 14 of its 23 locations in San Francisco, will become an in-house Starbucks brand, which means that customers may not have to bid adieu to the pastries and lunch sandwiches themselves, but just to the La Boulange stores and potentially the brand name.

These are the top-rated small business CEOs

Job-hunter web site Glassdoor put out its third annual Employees’ Choice Awards today. They rank the top-rated CEOs in the country, based on votes by their own employees. Among the top-ranked CEOs of large companies (those with 1,000 or more employees) were big names such as Google’s GOOG Larry Page, Facebook’s FB Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook of Apple AAPL.

But the survey also honored CEOs of small and medium-sized companies (those with fewer than 1,000 employees), and Fortune readers may recognize quite a few of the names on that list.

The top six small-business CEOs, all with a 98% approval rating, were: Frank Williams of Evolent Health (founded in 2011, based in Virginia); Tobias Dengel of WillowTree (an app development company that’s been around since 2007); Renaud Laplanche of LendingClub; Greg Penske of Penske Motor Group (see Fortune‘s recent profile of Penske’s father Roger); David Durand of Best Version Media (a publishing company that owns 250 magazines); and Scott Smith of OneGuard, which offers home warranties.

Rounding out the top 10 are Kevin Hartz, cofounder and CEO of Eventbrite (a ticket marketplace and tech “unicorn”); John Dowd of the New Jersey travel agency Sundance Vacations; Darius Mirshahzadeh of Endeavor America Loan Services; and Brian Halligan, CEO of Boston-area marketing company HubSpot, which went public last year.

Small-business services get Uber-ized

In seconds, it seems, the word “uber” has ex­panded from a brand (taxis, driven by freelancers, accessible via a simple smartphone app) into a business model. An increasing number of app­ based services now let you get things done from anywhere: your office, the road, even a vacation. Need an emergency power cord—or IT help or even an adviser—for an out-­of-­town presentation? Just let your fingers do the walking—on a series of apps that make business easier for entrepreneurs.

Shipping
If you’re on the go, you probably don’t have the time to hunt for an empty box and packing tape and stand in line at FedEx. New smartphone apps Shipster and Shyp will send a courier to you—whether you’re sitting in your office or at a coffee shop—within 20 minutes, then box your item and send it on its way. Shyp offers its service in Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, and San Francisco, while Shipster serves New York City and San Francisco (and also does crosstown delivery).

Temporary staffing
You’re out of town, and a worker walks off the job unexpectedly at your restaurant (or your warehouse … or your infotech startup) 150 miles away. Wonolo lets you post your empty job and find a temporary fill-in within 10 minutes, tapping into a pool of prescreened contractors. You pick what you’ll pay, and Wonolo charges a 25% finder’s fee. The service is now available in Los Angeles and San Francisco and should be expanding to five more cities this year.

IT help
If your computer crashes when you’re on the road (or even at home), apps can provide a nearly instant lifeline. Boomtown will connect you via video within a minute to an IT expert who will use your phone’s camera to remotely help with point-of- sale hardware, broadband, or computer software. The cost: $1 a minute. (If necessary, Boomtown will dispatch a technician on-site within four hours.) Geekatoo offers $99 monthly subscriptions for small businesses that guarantee 10 on-site visits and provide unlimited remote help from 6,800 tech specialists across the country. They can show up at your office within 24 hours, or if you book an on-call geek (for a product launch or big project), they can arrive within 30 minutes.

Gofer
Don’t have time to pick up an extension cord before a big client presentation? An app called Postmates will send a courier to pick it up and deliver it wherever you might be, even in the parking lot of a client’s office. Postmates has 10,000 contractors on call in 24 metro areas who can deliver items within an hour for a $5 to $20 fee, plus tip.

AdviceClarity aims to be a sounding board for entrepreneurs who need help on a business problem fast. The app lets you search more than 10,000 vetted experts and request a conference call at prices ranging from $1 to $161 per minute. You can also post or browse questions and answers free and participate in video events on various topics with other entrepreneurs.

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘Yes, There’s an Uber for That’.